Stuttgart 2012 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 54: Poster 3
Q 54.89: Poster
Thursday, March 15, 2012, 16:30–19:00, Poster.I+II
The Quantum Free-Electron Laser and the Jaynes-Cummings model — Rainer Endrich1, •Enno Giese1, Paul Preiss1,2, Roland Sauerbrey2, Wolfgang P. Schleich1, and M. Suhail Zubairy3 — 1Institut für Quantenphysik, Univeristät Ulm, 89069 Ulm, Germany — 2Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, 01314 Dresden, Germany — 3Institute for Quantum Studies, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4242, USA
Free-electron lasers (FELs) are a class of coherent light sources in focus of today's research. Many areas of science benefit from their unique properties, such as coherence or widely ranged tunability. The predictions from classical theory match the experimental results extremely well. So the usual classical approach is sufficient to understand FELs' principles of operation.
Recently the question has been raised whether it is possible to operate FELs in a regime, where quantum effects are of importance and cannot be neglected. The electron's recoil due to the scattering with a light wave has to be included in such a regime.
Unfortunately, a general quantum description of FELs leads to a model for which the time evolution cannot be solved analytically. Hence, we will face this problem by two approaches: We find a regime in which the FEL can be described as an effective two-level system ala Jaynes-Cummings model and the interaction takes place between two intervals in momentum space. The other approach is fourth-order perturbation theory in the photon number, where we see that mainly one-photon transitions occur in the quantum regime.